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Sechs Lieder aus Jucunde, Op 23

Introduction

The poet Hermann Rollett (1819-1904) was a native of Baden bei Wien and the son of a doctor. In his reminiscences, Begegnungen (‘Meetings’), he claims that on his way to school as a six-year-old in 1825 he caught a glimpse of Beethoven. At the age of ten he was often in the presence of Mendelssohn during one of that composer’s visits to Vienna. There are other names where the connections were more concrete: Schubert’s poetess Karoline Pichler was a patient of Rollett’s father and the aspiring poet came to know Grillparzer well. He also became a friend of the painter Moritz von Schwind (who illustrated one of Rollett’s poems) and one wonders whether the discussion ever turned to Schubert, one of the few Viennese eminences whom Rollett did not claim to have known. He travelled to Germany in 1844 and made contact with Justinus Kerner in Weinsburg whom he revered (Schumann’s Kerner Liederreihe, Op 35, is recorded in Volume 2 of this Hyperion Edition).

As a young man Rollett was a left-winger, a fiery advocate of press freedom and an opponent of Metternich. Such works as Kampflieder and Republikanisches Liederbuch (both 1848) would have made him a sympathetic figure to the Schumanns; it is perhaps for this reason that his novel Jucunde was welcomed into their household where the composer’s verdict on the poems therein was ‘sehr musikalische Gedichte’. During the 1840s the poet became less and less comfortable in his native land. Eventually he was forced to flee Austria and lived for a while as a so-called censorship-refugee in Germany. It was in Weimar in 1846 that he made the acquaintance of Hans Christian Andersen and Jenny Lind as they visited the graves of Goethe and Schiller. (His impressions of Andersen, whom he likened to a tall poppy in appearance, are sympathetic and forgiving of his egocentricities.) In 1851 he moved to Switzerland (where he came into contact with Wagner) and in 1854 returned to his home city where he was eventually appointed to a post as archivist of the city’s museums and lived out a life as a cultural historian, novelist and poet. He failed to achieve lasting fame and died in straitened circumstances.

From Schumann’s Haushaltbuch it appears that as early as December 1852 he possessed a copy of Rollet’s Jucunde, a novel with poetry in the manner of Mörike’s Maler Nolten. As this predates the work’s first edition we must assume that, as in the case of the Geibel poems, the composer must have been the recipient of an advance copy from the publisher anxious to encourage the musical settings which would add to the work’s circulation. The poet’s correspondence with the composer dates from the end of 1853 when Rollett was still living in Switzerland. He read in a newspaper that ‘Schumann’ had recently completed a cycle on texts taken from Jucunde; he wrote immediately to the composer in Düsseldorf enquiring about the rumour. Schumann answered saying that there was indeed a new cycle of Rollett settings bearing his surname, but that the songs had been written by Clara, and that he would have been pleased with the songs even if their composer had not been his wife. At the same time he expressed a warm interest in Rollett’s work for his own purposes and asked for a ‘Ballade’ from the poet’s hand. Rollett replied with a ten-strophe shocker, Der schwedische Reiter (‘The Swedish Rider’) a macabre and melodramatic tale of no great literary worth.

According to Rollett, Schumann replied in two letters almost at the same time: the first was polite and grateful, the second bluntly rude and dismissive about the ballad. The poet was confused by the mixture of charm and vehemence. Some weeks after this exchange he read that Schumann had thrown himself into the Rhine in a suicide attempt. Rollett wrote, self-importantly, that he was worried that the content of this ballad, ‘probably the last poem that the composer busied himself when in possession of his senses’, might have exacerbated Schumann’s nervous condition.

In December 1856 Clara Schumann visited Vienna and it was then that Rollett met her for the first time (although he claimed to have been her admirer from afar when she had given Klavierabende in Vienna in the late 1830s). She had been widowed in July and he felt awkward about discussing her husband. It was on this occasion that she presented him with a signed copy of her Sechs Lieder aus Jucunde (published in the preceding January) with an inscription to the ‘esteemed poet with friendly remembrances’. The cycle itself is dedicated to Livia Frege, the same soprano and family friend who had sung the Op 40 songs to Hans Andersen during his visit to Dresden.

Recordings

'Stephan Loges brings to his contributions the youthful warmth of his attractively vibrant baritone and his wonderful feeling for line and word … ...'[Stephan Loges] brings to his contributions the youthful warmth of his attractively vibrant baritone and his wonderful feeling for line and word ...» More

'The four soloists couldn’t be bettered … a delight from start to finish … a treasure indeed, a disc anybody interested in Lieder ought to h ...'An irresistible palette of voices … Unmitigated pleasure, from start to finish' (BBC Music Magazine)» More

This pretty little song forms an easy and natural segue to Robert Schumann’s Verratene Liebe which is written in a similarly minimalist folksong style. One is also reminded of the manner of Robert Schumann’s Liederalbum für die Jugend. In Rollet’s novel Jucunde this poem (as well as the next) is spoken by the eponymous heroine, a young widow with the saddest of fates. The other four lyrics are ascribed to Jucunde’s cousin Berthold with whom she is eventually reunited in the manner of the beautiful Magelone and her knight, Peter. Clara Schumann does not allow herself to be in the least influenced by this convoluted story. The criticism of Rollett’s poetry made by Joachim Draheim and Brigitte Höft (editors of the new edition of Clara Schumann’s songs for Breitkopf und Härtel) is understandable but perhaps too savage (‘vapid, cloyingly romantic nature poetry’). One must make allowances for the fact that Schumann’s approval of Rollett dates from a period when he was taken with the verse of the similarly precious Elisabeth Kullmann; by ‘musikalische Gedichte’ the composer meant poems modest enough for musical settings. Here the imagery encouraged Clara to music as clear and tuneful as a bell and she cut one of the poem’s verses with ruthless practicality.

Such pianistically simple music must have been a challenge to write for such a virtuoso; most of the other songs in the set have more florid accompaniments. The great pianist is not so easily contained elsewhere, but here all is modesty and gentleness, and one can see that an effort has been made to dress the piano writing in the same simple attire as the text. There is a suggestion of imitative counterpoint between voice and piano, and between the hands, but nothing to tax the most amateur pianist. The three strophes are organised as A, B, A2, where B is a variation of A with some minor-key harmonies, and A2 is adapted at the end to bring the song to a close with some climactic Schwung. The mordent on the word ‘jauchzten’ owes something to similar cadences in Robert’s Frauenliebe und -leben. The A major tonality shares the freshness of Schumann’s Mörike setting Er ist’s.

There is no song quite like this to be found in any of the Schumann lieder, and to give the composer his due as a proud husband he must have been rather pleased with it. He had renounced this type of piano writing in his own songs from the beginning, partly because he feared that virtuosic arpeggio figurations might swamp the texts, and also because he was in no position to play such florid writing himself on account of his injured right hand.

In this period there are many lieder of a vacuous kind (by forgotten composers) where arpeggio accompaniments with more glitter than substance are a hackneyed substitute for imaginative piano writing. This is not the case here. These arpeggios have a melodic function and are required to be gentle as well as forte. Contained within the swirling sextuplets of the introduction there is a chain of deliciously crafted suspensions which trace the outline of a slower concealed melody; this lends an air of calm to what otherwise would be hectic extravagance. In some ways Rollett’s text calls for the same mood of magical radiance and clarity of Schumann’s Im wunderschönen Monat Mai. The conjunction of all-mighty sun and tiny flower described in words which unite joy and virginal shyness.

Clara Schumann has written a song which looks blustery on the printed page but which turns our preconceptions about such writing on their head – perhaps Robert Schumann experienced the same surprise on reading it through for the first time. It might be said that it provides more of a portrait of Clara’s own piano technique than can be heard in any other of her songs. Of course the considerable difficulties of the accompaniment would have been nothing for her pianistic powers; but the calm sweetness contained within (or behind) the virtuosity is a quality always regarded as typical of her piano playing and of her musical nature.

The downside of a song with such an unusually prominent accompaniment are perhaps obvious. The vocal line is not particularly inventive in terms of prosody: there are passages in even crotchets which, had they not been tied to so much piano figuration, might have achieved a more interesting and independent rhythmic life. But even if it is unashamedly piano-led, the tune itself is lovely and well conceived for such a high soprano as Livia Frege. Again it is worthy of note that this song is more challenging in terms of tessitura than most of Schumann’s lieder. There is a forthright boldness to Clara’s character – ‘no messing about’ may be the suitable epithet – which is the other side of her nature: the song is not afraid to ask as much of its singer in technical terms as its pianist. The poem in four strophes provides two identical verses of music with an attached coda.

This is among the loveliest of Clara Schumann’s creations and one of three that Liszt selected for piano transcription – a fact that made Hermann Rollett particularly proud even if his own words were sidelined in the process! If the preceding song was not something that Robert Schumann might have written himself, this is the most Schumannian of the set; but it is still not in the composer’s song style. Here we can hear that Clara Schumann has played Robert’s music for solo piano until it has become a part of her. The D flat major key signature and the gently unfolding semiquaver triplets bring to mind Des Abends from Robert’s Fantasiestücke. That piece is in 2/8 with a triplet rhythm that is so arranged as to trace a melody (pricked out by the little finger of the pianist’s right hand) which implies three in a bar. The pianist’s little finger has a similarly melodic function in Geheimes Flüstern hier und dort but the metrical roles are reversed: Clara’s time signature is 3/8 and, whereas the vocal line holds to this rhythm throughout, the preludes, interludes and postlude gently tease the ear (and the player’s fingers) as they change between two and three in a bar.

At the beginning of the song the piano writing sings a melody in right-hand dotted quavers to achieve this smooth duple effect. The subsidiary semiquavers are dreaming filigree as gentle as wind-borne sighs. The melody gently unfolds; its soaring, long-breathed phrases not as easy to sing as they seem. Of course Clara has captured the atmosphere of the first strophe wonderfully: the whispering secrets of the title may have been the title of a piano piece, which is just what this music is in a way – a most beautiful instrumental prelude which is fetching enough to be heard no less than three times in a strophic construction. No wonder Liszt was attracted to it. And if we notice that Clara’s gift here has been to capture general mood rather than the specific detail, we must admit that to have responded to the change of mood in Rollett’s bracing second strophe would have hardly been worth the trouble.

These songs were written after Schumann had completed his work as a songwriter. Apart from Clara’s Das Veilchen (also from 1853) her Op 23 was the only vocal work to post-date the period of her husband’s creative life in the medium. Of course she was not to know this at the time (although she was mightily worried about his illness and would have been terrified by the prognosis) but one of her most creative periods was between 1853 and 1855 when Robert was still alive but mortally ill. After he died she scarcely composed again, but in this interim there was a powerful need to keep the home fires burning: composing kindled the warmth of happier times: continuing creativity in the home, despite Robert’s difficulties, provided a semblance of normalcy.

Of all the songs of Op 23 it is this, certainly the saddest and most simple in the set, which allows us to imagine Clara’s own state of mind at the time. The ‘green hill’ is of course a burial mound adorned by a rose and visited by a bird: the text is a none-too-deep contemplation on bereavement and on the importance of not being able to understand happiness until sadness has been experienced too. Schumann’s work on folksong and children’s music in the late 1840s and early 1850s is the influence on this gentle little A minor plaint. Clara almost certainly realised that her children were soon to lose their father, and it was perhaps in envisaging them coping with their loss that the song was written. This would explain the similarities, also in tonality, between Auf einem grünen Hügel and Die Waise (The Orphan) from Schumann’s Liederalbum für die Jugend Op 79.

The more ornate and extravagant music became in the hands of people like Liszt and Wagner, the more important it seemed to the Schumanns that the German virtues of simplicity and understatement were recommended by example to the young. Accordingly the piano writing dutifully doubles the vocal line in most of the song, although there are real touches of originality in some of the rhythmic displacements in the word-setting. The result is touching and heartfelt; such music might have come from the hands of Johannes Brahms in one of his folksong arrangements of some forty years later.

The influences here are probably the many Frühlingslieder of Mendelssohn, although the 6/8 movement, and the poetic imagery of the hunting horn resounding through the forest, also bring to mind Im Walde from the Eichendorff Liederkreis. Of course in comparison with Eichendorff’s the Rollett text is a succession of clichés, and this limits the effectiveness of the music. Or rather it does not challenge the composer to do much more than to set a general scene and stick with it through the song: this opus could easily be transcribed for clarinet and piano, say, the title of the individual songs (ie. the first lines of the poems) a sufficiently good guide to convey the mood of each piece from first to last assuming an obedience to the composer’s dynamic markings.

This is not to belittle Clara’s considerable talent but to emphasise how exceedingly rare it is to find, even among lieder composers celebrated in their time, that ability to create connections between word and tone which encompass meaning as well as mood. It is this which is at the core of Schubert’s genius, and only a handful of his successors – Robert Schumann being one of them. This having been said, the piece is delightfully written and the piano manner is completely individual. Clara thinks up figurations (as in the acciaccature-ornamented interlude after the first vocal phrase which really does describe the verb ‘klingen’) which would challenge the brain and fingers of any pianist. The nightingale flitters delicately in the only semiquaver triplet to decorate the song (under ‘durch’s Laub ein Flüstern zieht’) and the hunting horn dying in the distance is an effective, if not very original, effect. The song as a whole works in a single sweep; it has a vitality which brings a smile to the face of the audience if not to the its performers who have to work harder (the concluding high ‘A’ within a forte requires a certain vocal heroism) than it seems.

A final joyous paean ends this little cycle, a piece so full of onrushing high spirits (the marking is ‘Sehr lebhaft’) that it seems to be over before it has begun – even though it is constructed in two strophes where the music is repeated without change. Like the previous song in the cycle it is more simple on the ear than for the performers. The piano figurations are devilishly tricky and, as in the second and fifth songs in this cycle, the difficulties are absolutely Claraesque rather than Robertish. That she had spent a lot of her time playing virtuoso music by people such as Henselt, Herz, Hummel and so on is evident from this writing. This is not, however, music for the giant hands of Liszt; it weaves and dances with the finesse of smaller fingers able to undertake petit point.

The use of very busy chromatic harmony (an affection for the diminished seventh) and a persistently high tessitura such as this are also not typical of Robert Schumann. One of the interesting conclusions to be made about Clara’s song writing is that it was surprisingly uninfluenced by her husband’s lieder. What he was doing was so new and so extraordinary that one begins to wonder whether Clara actually liked her husband’s songs very much. She played them of course, but she never thought about making an edition of them. (This is a pity because scholars and performers would have learned much from a few notes from her concerning speeds and interpretation.) It is surely likely that Clara’s tastes (in song terms, if not in terms of solo piano writing) were more Mendelssohnian. For her, a song’s function seems to have been to please and entertain while writing interestingly for both voice and piano. Her songs are too pianistic to be approved of by the traditions of Reichardt’s Berlin, but neither do they attempt the lofty digressions of Schubert’s Vienna. Instead they tread a middle ground, more ‘modern’ in some ways than her husband’s, in terms of spiritual exploration less adventurous.

Psychological depth and profundity in a song, including her husband’s aspirations in that direction, might have seemed to her out of place – as they did to many of Schumann’s contemporaries who would have regarded the lieder of Wolf, for example, as monstrosities of ‘New Music’, a distortion of the essential modesty and simplicity of the lied. Clara did not simply follow three steps behind Robert in this field; she took another path which was more congenial to her own talents and reactions to literature. That she composed different types of songs from those of her husband shows her to be, if we did not already know this about her, a woman unafraid to do things her own way.